No Alternative Facts, Only Alternative Acts

Day 57: Vote With Your Wallet

Day 57 Action:

No matter how sappy and sweet their commercial, no matter how many tissues you need to get through their 30 second spot with the fridge and the big red bow – the cold hard fact about companies is that the bottom line to them- is cold hard cash. Yes, corporations want to look like they reflect their target audience (read: people they rely on to keep buying their products) but do they truly?

In today’s indignant political climate, do you know if the products you purchase and the companies you endorse, by wearing their brands and buying their merchandise, actually stand behind their emotional super bowl ads?

Does your brand of peanut butter source their cocoa from West African farms using child-slavery? Was your super chill outdoor gear actually made with cancer causing PFCs? Is your bank funding the DAPL, or do you buy your gasoline from a company who is building the Pipeline? (We won’t leave you hanging here, that’s Sunoco).

Or heaven forbid, do you give your hard earned money to a company who is most likely to snap your wallet shut due to their dealings… like that company is Billy Zane and your wallet is Rose’s delicate music box* (Google it kids)- a company who endorses the man, the myth, the brand… Trump?

Well, The American People have found a way to fight back in the language that all of these corporations understand, the capitalist market of choice. Here’s how you can start making informed choices and voting with your wallet.

Actions and Organizations:

SIGN UP at Buycott.com to shop brands that mirror your beliefs. Their site lists a myriad of campaigns from the Illusion of Choice, Support the Bees, End Animal Testing, Boycott Chocolate Produced by Child Slaves, to Boycott Trump and Boycott Koch (who, according to Buycott, has a motto -unsurprisingly- of “profits above all else” and has spent $196 Million on climate change denial-ism, among their many other sins). You can join/collect campaigns and then use the QR scanner on items to see what side of the fence the parent company falls on. If you don’t have any products in front of you, you can still search or browse products. If your purchase is on a no-buy list, they have recommendations of other similar products who are trying to do right.

VISITGrabyourwallet.org for a very comprehensive list, with contact information, of companies to boycott and which to shop instead. Like Buycott, they list the reasons why a company is or is not on the list. It’s not pretty and shiny but it gets the job done, though if you love excel spreadsheets, then it’s gorgeous.

VISITSleeping Giant. This is a google doc that lists all companies who have dropped their ads from Breitbart.

HELP Sleeping Giant by taking a screenshot of an ad on Breitbart, next to content – tweet the company (nicely) notifying them of the placement and tag @slpng_giants. There is also a EU Sleeping Giant Twitter as well many other countries, it’s a thing.